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Decarbonizing Tall Buildings: ASHRAE Conference Recap

By Drew Champlin, Journal Editor

NEW YORK CITY–More than 500 people attended the 2024 ASHRAE Decarbonization Conference: Decarbonizing Existing Tall Buildings, from Oct. 21-23 at the Sheraton New York Times Square hotel.

Adam Hinge, chair of the conference steering committee, said New York City became the choice due to “a lot of exciting policy activity here in New York.” One such is Local Law 97, which was highlighted in a discussion between Rohit Aggarwala, New York City Chief Climate Officer, and Fiona Cousins, Commissioner of Environmental Protection and CIBSE President, to open the conference. Local Law 97 passed in 2019 and requires buildings of over 25,000 ft2 (2,323 m2) in 2017 to reduce emissions by 40% in 2030 and 80% by 2050.

The conference featured technical sessions and panels that showed how places like New York City and others such as Toronto are working to reduce carbon emissions. It also highlighted challenges. Aggarwala mentioned how several of the buildings within the scope of Local Law 97 are low-to-moderate value residential buildings that use more heat and hot water from fossil fuels than they do electricity.

“You heard in the [opening] plenary that [there is] 12 to 15 billion dollars of investment that needs to happen between now and 2030,” Hinge said. “That’s going to be a lot of jobs for ASHRAE members and really help grow our industry.” 

Hinge is Managing Director at Sustainable Energy Partnerships in nearby Tarrytown, N.Y., and has first-hand experience with how buildings in New York City are being designed working to meet decarbonization goals.

Buildings must file carbon reports in 2025 and could face fines if they are not up to compliance, but they could get a mulligan “because it’s so hard to meet goals for 2020,” Aggarwala said, if they come up with a plan for meeting the compliance goal.

The conference was attended by engineers, property managers, portfolio managers, contractors, government employees, manufacturers, students, academic instructors and more. 

Dennis Knight, ASHRAE society president for 2024-25, was also in attendance at several sessions and organized a workforce development summit.

“What I have really been pleased about is that, in reference to my theme of empowering our workforce and sustaining our future, is the number of sessions and opportunities where workforce development has come up as being a critical piece of the puzzle in getting the people we need to do the work of renovating and decarbonizing 2.5 trillion ft2 (232 billion m2) of municipal buildings,” Knight said.

“The main thing I hope [attendees] get out of [the conference] is that there are technologies out there right now that we can begin to apply to start meeting our goals and hitting the targets we’ve set. There are plenty of case studies that are being shown that are magnificent from people that are already doing work. You can apply those principles to most any building. We’re talking residential and commercial.”

 

NYC Decarb Conference 2024

Image Credit: Drew Champlin.

Standards Updates

ASHRAE members Elizabeth Tomlinson (ASHRAE/ICC Standard 240P, Quantification of Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Buildings), Kimberly Cheslak (ASHRAE Standard 242P, Standard Method for Calculation of Building Operational Greenhouse Gas Emissions) and Amanda Webb (ASHRAE Standard 211, Standard for Commercial Building Energy Audits) provided updates on new and existing standards pertaining to decarbonization.

The goal is for Standard 240P to have its next independent substantive review in first quarter 2025 and to be published midyear 2025. The first full public review draft was released by ASHRAE on Feb. 2, 2024 and received more than 700 comments. Standard 240P will provide a methodology to quantify the embodied and operational greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with buildings and their sites. The standard will also provide minimum requirements for documentation of whole life-cycle GHG emissions.

Standard 242P has not been released for public review yet. The standard committee formed earlier in 2024. This standard intends to provide a common methodology for the calculation of GHG and carbon emissions of new and existing buildings. This standard provides a consistent procedure and data to be referenced by other standards that define methods of evaluation, verification, limitations, or targets for new and existing buildings. It does not establish methods of evaluation, verification, GHG or carbon emission goals or limits, or provide design guidance or requirements for buildings. When both standards 240P and 242P are published, the goal is for the other ASHRAE standards to reference these.

Standard 211 is ASHRAE’s energy audit standard. It was originally developed in 2018 and reaffirmed in 2023 with the addition of an informative appendix to provide a framework for carbon audits. The committee has revised its title, purpose and scope to add carbon audits and is working on moving the information in the informative appendix as requirements in the main body of the standard. SSPC 211 is determining whether the carbon audits will have levels similar to energy audits (1, 2, 3) and looking at energy auditors’ current skill set and how that will work in carbon audits.

Other Conference Notes

Several sessions reported on successes and obstacles while decarbonizing tall buildings in New York and elsewhere. There were educational sessions about topics such as sector coupling for heating and cooling, data center heat reuse, infiltration in cold climates and more. 

“I used to tell the steering committee the old Field of Dreams movie line–‘If you build it, they will come,’ and we built a really strong program and are thrilled that we had the level of interest that we had,” Hinge said. “I was really pleased with the international turnout. We’ve been beating the drum with New York City being a global capital and being a center of tall building decarbonization. The world wants to come here and sell their projects, and it’s nice to have a large number of speakers. Almost 15% of the audience is from outside of the U.S.”

To read more about that technical program, go here: https://tinyurl.com/mvb73nvk

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